Me and DonTomaso have been working on a cooperative game called Maplebits on and off for a long time - originally as a university project with three other friends, and lately as a hobby project. We've now got a version that we would love to get your help testing. The gameplay is a simple falling blocks affair. What makes Maplebits different is that it's entirely focused on cooperative play.

Please note that while the game is playable alone, multiplayer is what it's all about. Therefore, if you don't have anybody to play with, don't hesitate to add bots to your game.

Experience and levels - if you play while logged in to the site, you'll level up as you play. Don't worry, you don't need an e-mail to sign up.

"Avatar pieces". If you have created an account, you can design a custom piece that you can use in any games that you join. It's activated in game with a special powerup.

Custom piece sets. Anybody can create and submit their own piece set once they've reached level 5. You can also vote on piece set to affect how they're sorted ingame.

[size=12pt]World events[/size]We're planning to hold a few world-wide game sessions to try and gather a somewhat larger number of players. Since we're in Europe, however, we cannot guarantee a lag-free experience on other continents. If you're willing to host games on your local continent during these sessions, that'd be awesome. Please let us know in a reply.

The game sessions will be held on Sunday, July 17, at 09:00 GMT+1 and 18:00 GMT+1. Please join us then!

[size=12pt]Screenshots[/size]

[size=12pt]Feedback[/size]Any feedback, positive or negative, would be very much appreciated. Please let us know what you think! We're also cross-posting this on the TIGSource and Slick forums to try and get some additional feedback. We're definitely planning some further changes, but it's getting there.

I observed once and played it with a bot once, it seemed to work great. I think it'd be better if you had a 'real' server for it so people with routers/firewalls don't need to open ports to be able to play the multiplayer part.

Installation: +1 point if the game installs and uninstalls correctlyStability: +1 point if the game doesn't crash everPresentation: +1 point if the game is slickly presentedGraphics: +1 point if the game has "good" graphics that suit the gameStyle: +1 point if the game's overall style is "good"

Sound: +1 point if the game has "good" sound that suit the game - The music in the game is super nice would give it a +2 if that was allowed.

Innovation: +0 point if the game is original or brings a great new original twist - has a small twist but overall its still Tetris and could use with some more changes to gameplay

Completeness: +0 - Still feels a bit unfinished and could do with more features.

Fun Factor: +0 point if your judge enjoyed playing the game - multiplayer is enjoyable but hard to find games, single player could do with more challenge and stuff to hold the players attention.

Freebie: +1 point if you don't whine and you demand nothing of the mods (simply saying "can you rate my game please" is fine)

Demonpants / Cero: We've got a dedicated server system up and running (though delay is pretty bad atm), and a client version that half-supported there accidentally ended up as the live client on the website. Unfortunately, it happens to have a crash when you're not playing on a dedicated server, and that's not up yet, so that's what Cero saw.

Thanks for the feedback guys - we'll release a new version with a fix for the crash and a much improved installation process this week. If we can get the delay down on the dedicated server we'll include that as well.

We've updated the game to use a new distribution model, getdown. This means better caching (so faster load times in general) at the cost of a slightly increased first start time. It also means the game can run on all three major operating systems - Windows, OS X and Linux - without problems. Yay! \o/

We did some work towards supporting dedicated servers, but this is not quite complete and is not included in this release. Hopefully the next!

We've also fixed a crash bug occurring when joining game that was present in a version accidentally uploaded not long ago.

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